Vaibhav Kala of Aquaterra Adventures: The outdoors man
Summary
The founder of Aquaterra Adventures explains how the seeds for the company were sown, the challenges of creating guidelines for adventure tourism, and the importance of staying fit
From our vantage point, a short hop from Byasi village in Uttarakhand, we can see the Ganga silently rounding a bend before continuing downstream to Rishikesh. For more than three decades, Vaibhav Kala, 53, has admired this view and the many avatars of the river. This is where he first arrived, fresh out of college from St Stephen’s in Delhi, in 1992 to work as a river guide with tour operator Himalayan River Runners, setting aside a conventional career to chase a life outdoors.
It was a time when adventure tourism was a cottage industry. The market was restricted to a few players. Gear was hard to find and infrastructure was poor. Besides, when it came to Indian travellers, there were few takers for a holiday that put them outside their comfort zone.
However, Kala had experienced the magic of nature and wanted others to have a taste of it. He was aware of the ingredients required to curate a trip that was not just thrilling, but also safe. Launching Aquaterra Adventures in 1995 was the easy bit. Surviving the vagaries of the industry and setting the standard for adventure travel in India has demanded the patience of a mountain climber.
“Take me back and I’ll do it all over again. It’s been challenging, but what a ride this has been," Kala says, warming up with a cup of tea on a cloudy morning at Atali Ganga, Aquaterra’s base for most expeditions in Uttarakhand.
Aquaterra Adventures offers everything from river rafting, trekking and hiking to multi-day expeditions across the Indian Himalaya as well as abroad. From a handful of members scouted locally from around Rishikesh, Aquaterra’s team has today expanded to 80. Last year, the Delhi-based company registered an annual turnover of $1.5 million.
According to a report by Grand View Research, the Indian adventure tourism industry generated $16.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to climb to $46.7 billion by 2030. It comes at a time when Indians are taking on adventures of all kinds—from climbing the highest mountains to exploring far-flung valleys and setting off on multi-day rafting trips.
“There was a generation that had no access to the outdoors and never went out swimming, cycling, hiking or camping with their parents like they do in the West. Things started changing around the late 1990s and early 2000s," Kala says.
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However, the industry has seen regular impediments such as the Uttarakhand floods in 2013 and the pandemic in 2020. Then, there has been the uncontrolled growth of adventure tourism that has not only ruined pristine environments, but also resulted in casualties and called for preventive measures. For instance, camping along the Ganga in Uttarakhand was banned in 2015, while Stok Kangri, a mountain in Ladakh, has been off limits since 2020.
“There’s no regulation of operators or registration of guides. Anyone with a tent and a website can sell things. Then, there’s the problem of access control. You can drive up to any place, park your car and walk into the wilderness. Nobody knows where you are, what you are doing and what you are leaving behind," he says.
As the senior vice-president of the Adventure Tour Operators Association of India that represents around 15,000 stakeholders, Kala and his team have been working with the government to arrive at guidelines for adventure tourism.
“The main challenge today is risk management, capacity building and registration of companies. The new trend of considering adventure travel as a commodity business is a mistake. I think it is still at the stage where it needs to be driven from the front (by stakeholders). Because things happen when you least expect it. It’s moving slowly, but we are finally thinking about these things. The goal is to set an international benchmark," he says.
“We’ve had to withstand the test of time because the customer was unaware (of the things they could expect or what the standard was with respect to adventure travel) at the start. It took a while but today there’s a market that wants these experiences, understands quality and prioritises safety. And this segment is steadily growing," Kala says.
The ground rules were laid out at the start, a focus on gear, guides and guidelines. Kala chooses to be hands-on while executing every minor detail of the itinerary even today. “There’s no substitute for adventure travel. The focus is on owning every piece of the experience—the product, the infrastructure and the manpower. Pull one out and you cannot deliver a trip that is on par with international standards. It’s the only way to ensure safety and keep them coming back," he says.
Sustainability is at the heart of their operations. Kala says last year they recycled 1.5 million litres of water at Atali Ganga and created 35 check dams around the property to replenish groundwater and prevent soil erosion. There’s also been a constant effort to eliminate the use of single-use plastic in all their operations.
But starting out in the pre-internet era was difficult. Domestic tourists were slow to warm-up to the outdoors. Most of Kala’s early clientele came through tie-ups with international partners.
That didn’t stop him from opening up new trips, which were as diverse as the mountain landscapes they operate in—treks and hikes, jeep safaris and rafting and camping across the Himalaya. Over the next few years, they started weekend rafting operations on the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda. Then followed longer trips on the Tons and the Kali. They were soon travelling outside of Uttarakhand—to the Subansiri, Lohit and Siang in the North-East and the Zanskar in the north. And wandering to remote spots like Auden’s Col in Uttarakhand and Parang La in Himachal Pradesh that few had accessed in the past.
This newness in the space of Indian tourism was lapped up by foreign publications, followed by national dailies, and tracked by in-flight and travel magazines. TV shows like The Great Escape and Road to Ladakh in the early 2000s and several documentaries took these destinations to living rooms across the country. And then came the internet.
“Indians were lured by the images they saw on the screen. Besides attracting individuals, it seeped into corporate boardrooms and school youth programmes as well. We were at the right place and at the right time. We still don’t have anybody on-ground pushing our trips. People develop an emotional connection when they experience something memorable. And the word spreads," he adds.
Aquaterra draws an audience of all kinds. Young blood seeking new thrills, families looking for quality time amid nature and bosses in need of challenges outside the office. Manu Anand, ex-CEO of PepsiCo, and Vishal Pandit, former boss of GE Money India, shared a climb up Kilimanjaro in Tanzania earlier this year. To celebrate his 60th birthday, N. Chandrasekaran, chairman of the board of Tata Sons, set off on Kang Yatse II in Ladakh alongside his wife, Lalitha. It has often put Kala in unusual situations.
“When Chandrasekaran had to call the office, we had to send a team member to another ridge where he could catch mobile network and relay messages via a walkie-talkie," Kala says.
Kala believes in active guiding and leading from the front, whether it’s climbing up to Ranakot like we did on a glorious February morning, or shouting instructions to his raft mates on the Ganga a day later. Once at camp, he’s at equal ease as a raconteur and a listener, one among the tribe. “It’s not a regular career option. You need to have aptitude, you need to have love for it and you need to be untiring in that love for creating new experiences and visiting new places," he says.
It means maintaining fitness to hike up mountains, paddle gigantic wave trails, and lift bulky packs and humongous rafts. Though he religiously pursues squash whenever back home in Delhi, it’s the early years of conditioning that serves him well in the outdoors. It’s where he is his natural self, and he finds it therapeutic.
“It makes you think more clearly and I’ve had some of the best ideas while walking in nature. And then there is God’s beauty, it’s priceless," he says.
He started appreciating these things early on as an Army kid, growing up in obscure cantonment towns where he enjoyed everything from the simple joys of running obstacle courses, climbing ropes and horse riding.
He regularly visited the mountains after joining the hiking club at St Stephen’s College. The seeds for Aquaterra were sown in 1994 on an expedition to Gya, a 6,794m mountain at the tri-junction of Ladakh, Spiti and Tibet. At Camp 2, Kala and his founding partner, Solil Paul (who quit in 2004), sat huddled in a tent, bogged down by heavy rain. Their restless minds wandered in the inclement weather as they started discussing future plans. Though separated by 12 years, they had met through their common passion for the outdoors. The big question was, could they make a living off it? At those magical heights, the answer was yes. They launched Aquaterra the following year.
From the Himalaya in their backyard, Aquaterra has branched out to other parts of the world—climbing Aconcagua and hiking to Machu Picchu in South America, and rafting down the Zambezi in Africa and the Colorado in North America. Next month, Kala is off for his first hike in the Dolomites in Italy, even as he’s trying to put together a trip to Lhasa with the promise of a night under the spectacular North Face of Everest.
“There was a time when we had less overheads and responsibilities. We could decide whether we wanted to run a season or not. All that’s changed and as an outdoors person, I need to keep finding new products to run all year round. It’s a challenge but then that’s the fun of it because it keeps you on your toes. If you want to stay ahead of the game, you need to keep doing new things," he says.
In the next few years, Kala would like to steal some time away from his regular schedule and take a hike with his buddies. And perhaps go back to where it all started for him and make another attempt to get to the summit of Gya. Of course, if the weather holds.
